See below for this year’s lineup. In the coming weeks we’ll be posting interviews with the speakers. Although he makes his home in Portland, Oregon, Aaron Draplin is more a product of being born, raised, and educated in the Midwest. A native of Detroit, he studied graphic design at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design before heading west to work as art director of Snowboarder magazine. He…

There’s a backlash against architects who are making “buildings that have movement and feeling,” says Frank Gehry. “The notion is that it is counterproductive to social responsibility and sustainability.”

Despite its “bizarre” proportions and serifs that are “some crossbreed of whale and polar bear,” there’s lots to love about the “sexy ugly” typeface Cooper Black, writes Armin Vit.

The house Frank Lloyd Wright designed for Eddie the black lab was triangular with Phillipine mahogany and cedar details and Wright’s trademark low-pitched roof. Built in 1963, the house never appealed to the dog, though, and was dismantled 10 years later.

Co Adaptive Architecture won December’s Architects for Animals contest in New York for structures that both shelter homeless cats and wirelessly beam data to base stations about the population, which is estimated at 20 million cats nationwide.

“Better design is precisely what suburban America needs… Designers and policy makers need to see the single-family house as a design dilemma whose elements—architecture, finance and residents’ desires—are inextricably linked.”

Sean Adams finds inspiration from the German newspaper Die Welt, which, under the urging of culture editor Cornelius Tittel, paid homage to Ellsworth Kelly recently by replacing all news photos with the artist’s iconic shapes.

In honor of next week’s release on DVD of his urban planning documentary, Urbanized, director Gary Hustwit blogs a DVD extra, footage of the demolition of the final tower of Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing project.